Understrike Read Online Free Page A

his night office and went back to bed. The time had come and it could not have happened at a more judicious moment. Tomorrow there would be much to do. The organisation had to be foolproof.
    *
    Just before they woke him, in the villa on the outskirts of the city. Vladimir Solev had been dreaming of the dark Ukrainian girl who had been his guest on the previous evening. At first he thought it was her hand on his shoulder, shaking him up from the warmth of sleep. But it was his staff instructor. He was to be in the briefing room in one hour. He would be going on a journey and there would be further orders on arrival. The situation—his instructor told him, sitting on the bed like a sick visitor—was fluid. But there was little doubt that the training was going to be put to the test. His glorious moment would soon come.
    Vladimir Solev—Boysie Oakes’ double—felt his stomach rise. He heaved noisily, and quite effectively, into his handkerchief.
    *
    Boysie read the cablegram twice. Once, standing by the wash basin, where he had just been completing his morning shave when the steward arrived with the white envelope on a silver tray. Again, slumped—a quivering, boneless jelly in his armchair after croaking “No reply” in the wake of the departing flunkey. Boysie could understand why those Old Testament kings used to exterminate bearers of bad tidings. He had taken an almost homicidal dislike to the wretched man who had delivered this Boysie-changing slip of paper.
    Unlike Solev, Boysie had no use for his handkerchief. For ten minutes he retched out his fear into the basin—moaning in anguish and accidentally upsetting a bottle of Floris 89 toilet water on to the cabin floor where it left a damp circle of fragrance which later caused the cabin steward to raise his eyebrows a little higher than usual. Boysie had not felt like this for months. His hands were shaking; his bowels seemed to contain a small electric mixer, turned to top speed and operating a dough hook; his heart was thudding audibly under the sea island cotton vest; and his throat felt as though someone was titillating his uvula with a cotton-wool swab.
    He was all too familiar with the symptoms. The diagnosis was simple—stark, staring, yellow fear in a massive overdose. In the months that had passed since the Chief—via Mostyn—had taken him off the liquidating assignments, Boysie had never really allowed himself to think about possible reactions to any dangerous operation that the Department might put in his way.
    Life had been quiet, gay and good. Boysie had felt that if Mostyn ever came up with a diabolical scheme that was beyond his small, nervous, neurotic powers, he could always spin a neat excuse from his cunning mind and so slide out of the Department for good and all.
    But now it was here. Right out of the cloudless blue, the dark business of having to work near death had caught him unawares. There was no mistaking the cablegram. It could mean one thing only. An operation, of some kind, was brewing. An operation earmarked specially for Boysie. And Boysie knew, through bitter experience, that in the Department operations were dangerous. Blue funking dangerous. For the hundredth time since he had been eased into the Department, Boysie wondered how he had managed to get mixed up in the game at all.
    “ Bloody hell!” he groaned to himself. “Oh bloody, bloody hell. Why didn’t I get out of it after the last little lot?” He looked blankly round the cabin which seemed despicably normal. The old cry of fear was ripping him apart: and he did not even know what the operation was. BRANCH MANAGER TO CALL AT YOUR HOTEL contained the key to unknown terrors. Boysie’s mind started to dwell deeply on the possibilities. He might easily be left waiting for this “Branch Manager” for a week or two—Mostyn had always been an inconsiderate bastard—and, to be left cooling one’s heels would only increase the nervous tension. A myriad pictures weaved